Having been brought to New Orleans Criminal District Court from Angola prison, Adam Frank climbed onto the witness stand on Tuesday and swore he did not participate in the March 4, 1995, triple murder at a local restaurant that his sister, former NOPD officer Antoinette Frank, and her friend, Rogers LaCaze, were convicted of committing before being sent to death row.

A team of appeals lawyers has been pushing for LaCaze, now 36, to get a new trial during a post-conviction evidentiary hearing that started June 17, citing a wide range of grounds; in the process, they have alleged that prosecutors working for ex-District Attorney Harry Connick improperly withheld evidence that suggested it may have been Adam Frank, not LaCaze, who helped Antoinette Frank carry out the heist that resulted in the shooting deaths of NOPD officer Ronald "Ronnie" Williams II, 25, and siblings Ha Vu, 24, and Cuong Vu, 17, at Kim Anh restaurant in eastern New Orleans.

Williams, like Antoinette Frank, provided security at the restaurant. The Vu siblings were employees there.

With Adam Frank's appearance in court on Tuesday, the state sought to shatter any notion that he was his sister's accomplice.

Adam Frank testified that the last time he was in New Orleans before Tuesday's hearing was in early January 1995, when he visited his sister at her home. He said he then moved to Rayville in northeastern Louisiana, and was not in New Orleans when the Kim Anh slayings occurred; he was a fugitive, wanted on an unrelated charge of attempted homicide at the time.

"Did you participate in the murder of Ronnie Williams? Did you participate in the murders of (the Vus)?" Assistant District Attorney Andrew Pickett asked Adam Frank on Tuesday. Frank, in shackles and a prison-issued orange jumpsuit, replied, "No, sir," to both questions.

Sheriff's deputies lead Rogers Lacaze, 18, out of the Kim Anh restaurant in July 1995 after Lacaze and the judge, jury and attorneys in Lacaze's trial returned to the scene of a triple slaying.NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune archive

LaCaze's lawyers say there is evidence that Adam Frank repeatedly bragged about murdering a New Orleans police officer and maybe even had the weapon that was used at Kim Anh. In 1998, three years after the murders that shocked the New Orleans community, Adam Frank was arrested in Rayville after authorities say they received a tip from a confidential informant that he had boasted about killing an NOPD cop.

Frank escaped the day after that arrest but was recaptured within a month or so. When caught, Frank carried a 9mm Beretta Model 92G, the same caliber, make and model as the gun the state believed was used to kill Williams and the Vus.

The serial number on the pistol Frank had was rubbed off, but NOPD crime lab personnel recovered a portion of it. What was recovered matched the serial number on the weapon police surmise was used at Kim Anh, but the gun was destroyed before anyone tested it against evidence from the restaurant, according to a statement from a previous court hearing.

Frank eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated escape and served two years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to a 2003 armed robbery and received a 65-year sentence to Angola.

While imprisoned, Frank became acquainted with an inmate named Darren Reppond, who has said that he heard Frank say he fatally shot a police officer at a New Orleans restaurant. But, on Tuesday, Frank denied ever discussing the Kim Anh case with Reppond.

"Did you ever brag about killing a New Orleans police officer?" Pickett asked Frank. Frank, as he did to many questions, answered simply, "No, sir."

Frank also testified that Ronnie Williams had helped him find a job at a club in town. He said he would go to Kim Anh with his sister and noted that he would sometimes speak with Chau Vu, who was among three people at the restaurant who survived the deadly robbery.

Antoinette Frank is escorted out of the Kim Anh restaurant after the jury in her September 1995 murder trial was given a tour of the murder scene. Times-Picayune archive

After establishing that the muscular, 6-foot, 5-inch Adam Frank was familiar with Chau Vu, Pickett asked presiding Judge Michael Kirby to instruct Frank and LaCaze - seated at the defense table, also in orange prisoner's garb - to stand next to each other. As the two men stood, Frank towered over LaCaze, sending the message that it was implausible that the two men could be confused for one another.

Pickett later asked Frank whether he had been promised or was expecting anything in return for his testimony. Frank said he had not, either by Pickett or his fellow assistant district attorney, Matthew Kirkham, both of whom visited the convict in Angola for the first time earlier in June.

During her cross-examination, Blythe Taplin, one of LaCaze's lawyers, asked Frank whether he wanted to protect his sister, who had been brought to Angola for a visit with her brother the previous week. Frank said: "All family should be protected."

Taplin then asked Frank if he knew that his father had sexually abused his sister. Frank said his mother made him aware of that once he became an adult.

Taplin began interrogating Frank about whether he knew what happened to his father, who was reported missing in 1994. Skeletal remains were discovered under Antoinette Frank's house in November 1995, after she had already been convicted in the Kim Anh murders. There was speculation in the news media back then that the bones belonged to the Franks' father.

But the district attorney's office, now headed by Leon Cannizzaro, objected to that line of questioning on Tuesday, arguing that it was irrelevant. The judge agreed.

Taplin also asked Frank about letters he wrote to police and prosecutors in 2003, offering to trade information about other criminal defendants for help with his legal troubles.

Pickett and Kirkham set up Frank's testimony on Tuesday in part by calling Quoc Vu to testify on Monday. Quoc Vu, another of the three robbery survivors, was the only person who picked LaCaze out of a photographic line-up of possible suspects shortly after the shootings.

A source at the district attorney's office who did not wish to be named said Quoc Vu testified consistently with what he had sworn to at the trial: LaCaze, not Adam Frank, was the man he saw helping Antoinette Frank, now 42, on the night of the murders at Kim Anh restaurant.

Furthermore, before Adam Frank showed up Tuesday, Pickett and Kirkham called Marco Demma, one of the lead NOPD investigators on the Kim Anh case, to testify. Demma said there was never any evidence linking Adam Frank to the killings.

"He was not a person of interest ... in this investigation," Demma said.

LaCaze's lawyers dispute that, however. For example, at LaCaze's trial, NOPD officer Stanley Morlier was questioned by the defense about a confrontation Williams may have had with Adam and Antoinette Frank at Kim Anh. Morlier denied there was ever any such confrontation.

But at Antoinette Frank's trial, which followed LaCaze's, Morlier said he and Williams once had to eject Adam Frank from the restaurant, which prompted Antoinette Frank to confront Morlier and say, "You tell Ronnie Williams that when he messes with my brother, he's messing with me. And I'll take him out."

Eighteen years later, on Tuesday, with Williams' parents watching in the courtroom, Pickett asked Antoinette Frank's brother, "Did you kill anyone on March 4, 1995, in New Orleans at the Kim Anh restaurant?"